


Of Old Souls and Vampire Hunters

by Kazzy



Category: Night World - L. J. Smith
Genre: Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-14
Updated: 2012-03-14
Packaged: 2017-11-01 22:19:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/361900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kazzy/pseuds/Kazzy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>“I thought you were the saddest person I’d ever seen, and the most beautiful – and the bravest. I knew you wouldn’t betray Circle Daybreak.”</i> –Hugh</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Old Souls and Vampire Hunters

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer – They belong to the lovely LJS, not me. I’m borrowing them for a bit and I promise to leave them as I found them.

“You’ve been told to stay away! You’re not welcome here, Leech!”

The tone and the words startled Hugh, coming as they did from a Daybreaker. It generally wasn’t accepted vernacular – after all, when you were friends with a vampire, you didn’t exactly want to go around calling their species names. Not to mention Circle Daybreak was supposed to welcome anyone no matter what their heritage.

But this was a lamia controlled area, and vampires – always the smallest group in Circle Daybreak – rarely associated outside of the Night World. Too many opportunities to be recognised.

But as Hugh leaned out of the door of the meeting house, he was still surprised to see a small group of his fellow members surrounding a girl with red hair. She was shaking her head, her jaw set at a stubborn angle, her eyes flashing angrily – but not, he noticed, silver.

As he watched, she turned to go, and just for a second he thought her gaze was haunted, rather than angry. And in that moment, he thought he saw something that reminded him of someone he knew – boy who’d lost his family at age seven, and suddenly found himself belonging to a very different world than he could have imagined.

“What’s going on here?” he asked Melia, a witch several years older than him.

She nodded towards the retreating back. “Jezebel Redfern – from one of those gangs in the city, the ones that like killing humans. Says she’s turned over a new leaf or something. Wants to join us.” There were layers of contempt in her tone, which made Hugh frown.

“And?” he said.

“ _And_? Hugh, did you miss something – the part about her being _murdering scum_ , maybe?”

“And how many people here can throw stones?” he asked pointedly. “If she is who you say, then she’s likely to be a fighter – we need those.”

“Hugh, wait—!”

But by the time he got to the curb, the vampire was gone, and hadn’t looked back. Hugh was rarely irritated by the actions of others – generally he could guess motives, and most of them were understandable. Every so often, however, he ran up against blind prejudice, and that did annoy him. But he kept it from showing, as he knew that his anger would convince no one of anything other than his irrationality. 

Convincing the others that he believed Jez was in earnest still turned out to be a nearly impossible task even with calm reasoning. Oh, they believed he believed her – all due respect to the Old Soul in their midst and all, but they seemed to think him slightly naïve and too willing to believe a sob story. What they were less certain of was whether or not she was telling the truth. Or again, they were certain – certain she was lying through her teeth.

Eventually, though he persuaded them to at least send some people to investigate her claims that she had left her gang for good without telling anyone where she was going. Allowing him to go alone to meet her the next day took a little longer, but he was adamant and eventually got his own way.

The official aim of Circle Daybreak was to see all species living in peace, and they promoted the fact that everyone was capable of good – and evil – but old prejudices died hard. And one of the biggest and oldest would remain vampire=bad, especially among those who had little contact with them.

Hugh, who had travelled a little further than most of those around here had had more contact with both lamia and made vampires and knew first hand they were just people, same as witches and ‘shifters and humans. More to the point, several lifetimes ago he’d had a friend who was lamia. In the end, it’d been the death of both of them, but his friend had never once done anything to earn his mistrust. All of them were capable of brilliance and all of them were capable of making fatal errors. And all of them were capable of changing.

-x-x-x-  
Finding out where she lived was out of the question. That was, if she was even living somewhere other than on the streets. However, taking a wild guess, he waited in the parking lot of the local high school – he could have had someone break into the school records, but that smacked of threatening her right to privacy and safety. 

As it turned out, he didn’t have to wait long, almost as soon as the bell rang the redhead stalked out of the main building and directly towards her bike, not far from where he was standing. She didn’t appear to notice him, or otherwise dismissed him as unimportant, which was what he was hoping for – if he presented himself as an unthreatening human she might be more likely to listen to him.

Quickly, before she could drive off, he approached her. “Jezebel Redfern?”

She turned toward him sharply, eyes dark, but he was right: they were pained rather than angry. She was very sad and very beautiful, and there was something distinctly unvampirish about her.

“Jez,” she corrected sharply, looking him up and down, and apparently – just he had hoped – dismissed him as a threat.

“I’m Hugh, and I’m with Circle Daybreak.” Her expression became even more guarded – not that he could blame her after the previous afternoon. “Were you serious?” he asked. “About joining us, I mean?”

She gave a sharp nod. “Yeah.”

That was all the reassurance Hugh needed. “Then can you meet me in an hour at—” he gave directions to a Day World owned café, where they’d have enough privacy to talk, but be public enough that attack was unlikely— “around four?”

She agreed, looking like she thought she might just be consenting to her execution. “What about the others?” she asked, a jerk of her head indicating the rest of the local Daybreakers.

“I’ll talk to them.”

She didn’t say thank you, but then there probably wasn’t a lot for her to feel for grateful for at that moment.

“See you in an hour,” she said. And she was gone with a roar of a motor.

So it was that he found himself entering the prearranged café at four to find Jezebel Redfern – Jez – sitting at a table in the corner, by the window, staring moodily into a massive cup of something milky and hot.

Once again, she appeared not to notice, although he doubted she truly had failed to, as he assumed someone like Jez would be very aware of her surroundings. He purchased his own drink, earl grey tea, and drifted over to sit across from her.

Only after he was settled did she look up at him with a mixture of sadness, vulnerability and defiance.

“So, why do you want to join Circle Daybreak?” he asked her after a few minutes, when it became clear she wasn’t going to break the silence.

Sadness was replaced by what looked like blind panic, confirming his suspicions that something had happened to completely upend her world view. He also had a feeling that she was showing more vulnerability than she would were she not so utterly shaken by the experience.

“I…” she said. “I’m…” she shook her head. “Why do you believe me?”

“Well, my friends have taken to using words like ‘naïve’ and ‘soft’, but I like to think I can see the truth when it’s staring me in the face.”

“You’re human?” she asked, though she could hardly have failed to notice.

“Yeah – an Old Soul, not that it matters.”

Her eyes widened a fraction. “I’ve never met one of those before.”

“No,” he replied as dryly as he could. “Neither have I, but I hear they’re good people anyway.”

As jokes went it was fairly lame, but he was gratified to see the slight twitch of her lips.

“How?” she asked at last.

How did he become an Old Soul? How did he find out about the Night World? How did he join Circle Daybreak? All those questions rolled into one word, and sometimes trust had to be given before it could be received. So he told her – about the ‘wolves who killed his family, about remembering the past, about finding Circle Daybreak.

At the end there was regret in her face, and understanding. She offered no sympathy, or pity, which made a nice change. She wasn’t horrified or surprised by his story – she knew such emotions were pointless.

He liked that about her.

After a pause she took a deep breath, and looked down at the table. Her monstrous was cup still untouched, while his tea was nearly gone. “I’m half-human,” she said at last.

Even with everything he’d seen in a multitude of lives, and everything he knew, it took a moment for her words to sink in. When they did, he sat back in surprise.

Half-breeds were exceptionally rare, no matter what their origins, and it was common knowledge that without some fairly powerful magics lamia couldn’t reproduce with other species. Of course, all Redferns were part witch, though whether or not that had anything to do with Jez’s situation, he didn’t know.

“I didn’t know,” Jez unconsciously echoed his thoughts, if not his sentiment. “My parents were killed when I was three—” she hadn’t offered him any pity, but he found himself having to fight to give her the same honour. “My uncle told me their murderers were vampire hunters.”

“But they weren’t.”

“No. They were vampires.” Because the punishment for falling in love with a human and for telling them about the Night World was death.

“How did you find out?” he asked gently.

“I remembered.” This time, Hugh couldn’t contain the wince of sympathy, but Jez was carrying on. “And then I knew – that I was a killer of my own kind.”

He longed to reach out and take her hand, to offer something that would help her. Because, as horrifying as the contemplation of what she had done in the past, underneath it all she was a person and someone who desperately needed his friendship. But he knew she would probably not welcome pity, or even sympathy, anymore than he had done, so he kept himself still – regretful and understanding.

“So,” he said. “Here you are.”

“Here I am,” she agreed grimly.

“Why do you want to join Circle Daybreak?” he asked her again.

This time she answered. “I figure I owe the other side some.”

He nodded. The most common reason for joining Circle Daybreak was that they had nowhere else to go. The second was that wanted back a little bit of power that had been stolen from them by either world. The distant third honestly believed humans and night people could live in peace. Jez seemed to fit somewhere between one and two, and while Hugh was all for number three, he could understand where she was coming from.

But still…“Can I offer you some advice?” He didn’t wait for her approval before continuing. “Don’t make this about revenge, or redemption. You – and your parents – deserve better.”

She didn’t completely understand, he could tell, but he hoped she might one day.

“Wait there for a moment,” he told her and borrowed a pen from the counter. When the rest of the Circle found out about this, they were going to have his head on a platter, but he scrawled his number on a napkin and passed it to her. “Call me in a few days and we’ll talk some more,” he said.

“And the others?” she asked. Clearly whatever had been said to her had left an impression. She knew she wasn’t welcome and that saddened him further, as people like Jez were the ones who arguably needed the most support.

Hugh grimaced. “I’ll work on it – they’ll come around.”

Her look of disbelief said it all, but he hurried to reassure her. “It’s not actually personal – they just don’t...like vampires.”

If anything her scepticism increased.

“They’ll come around,” he said again. And they would, because it was mostly about her being lamia and because he could already tell she was a good person. Eventually they’d see that and so would she – he just had to prove it.

“Do you have somewhere to stay?” he asked.

“My mother’s family. They don’t know about the Night World.” Her tone implied she was not about to enlighten them and she wouldn’t take it well if someone did it for her, and Hugh understood, even if he didn’t completely agree.

“Good,” he answered instead. He could have found her somewhere to live, but he doubted it would have been easy, considering local prejudices. “In a few days, then.”

She nodded distractedly, looking down at her still untouched drink. “In a few days.”

As they parted at the door to the café, Hugh really hoped she’d call.


End file.
